Free Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga Page B

himself at his father and killed him right then.
    Giri took him away to his room. ‘Let’s wash up, Baba. We’ll go to your room and drink some warm milk. That’s what we’ll do.’
    Returning to the living room, Giri found his employer and Shanmugham on either side of the Dancing Nataraja, examining the white thing that shared the wooden table on which the bronze statue stood: a plaster-of-Paris model of a building, which a peon from Mr Shah’s office had brought to the flat two days ago.
    ‘Will you go and speak to the boy now?’ Giri asked. ‘Say something nice.’
    Shah ran his palm down the side of the plaster-of-Paris model.
    ‘Bring me a plate with some toast, Giri,’ he said. ‘At once. And some for Shanmugham, too.’
    Giri glared at Shanmugham as he went to the kitchen; he did not approve of the presence of employees during meals.
    Shah kept looking at the plaster-of-Paris model. His eyes went down to the inscription on its base:
    C ONFIDENCE S HANGHAI V AKOLA , S ANTA C RUZ (E) S UPER L UXURY A PARTMENTS ‘F ROM M Y F AMILY TO Y OURS ’
    ‘Look at it, Shanmugham,’ he said. ‘Just look at it. Won’t it be beautiful when it comes up?’
    From the moment the car turned on to the bridge at Bandra, Shah had kept his eyes closed.
    He felt his pulse quickening. His lungs became lighter. It was as if he had not coughed in years.
    The Mercedes came to a halt; he heard someone opening the door for him.
    ‘Sir.’
    He stepped out, holding Shanmugham’s hands. He had still not opened his eyes; he wanted to defer the pleasure for as long as possible.
    He could already hear the two of them: the Confidence Excelsior and the Confidence Fountainhead. Rumbling, the way the boy had been inside his mother’s womb, in the last months before delivery.
    He walked over truck tyre ruts, hardened and ridged like fossilized vertebrae. He felt crushed granite stones under his feet, which gave away to smooth sand, studded with fragments of brick. The noise grew around him.
    Now he opened his eyes.
    Cement mixers were churning like cannons aimed at the two buildings; women in colourful saris took troughs full of wet mortar up the floors of the Fountainhead. Further down the road, he saw the Excelsior, more skeletal, covered with nets and scaffoldings, ribs of dark wooden beams propping up each unbuilt floor.
    A small village had sprung up around the construction work: migrants from north India, the workers had re-created the old home. Cows swatting away flies, broth in an aluminium vessel boiling over, a small shrine of a red god. Hitching up his trousers, Shah walked up to the cow; he touched its forehead three times for good luck and touched his own.
    A group of day-labourers were waiting for him.
    ‘How is the cement pouring today?’ he asked.
    ‘Very well, sir.’
    ‘Then why are you people standing here, wasting time?’
    He counted the men. Six. They wore banians and white dhotis, and their bodies were filmed over with construction dust. The contractor in charge of work at the Fountainhead came running.
    ‘They say, sir, the heat… they want to go and tend their fields…’
    Shah clicked his tongue.
    ‘I want them to speak for themselves.’
    One of the group of mutineers, a small man with neatly parted hair, explained.
    ‘We can’t work in these conditions, sahib, please forgive us. We will finish the day’s work honestly, and leave in the evening. Ask the contractor. We have been your best workers until now.’
    Shah looked up at the Fountainhead, and then at the Excelsior, and raised his eyes to the sun.
    ‘I know it is hot. The coconut palms are turning brown. The cows don’t want to stand even if you put food in front of them. I know it is hot. But we have only a month before it starts raining, and we must finish pouring concrete now. If we don’t, I will lose a month and a half – two months, if the rains are heavy. And time is one thing I cannot lose.’
    He spat something thick, pink, and gutka